Sex, Religion, and the New Woman in China: A Comparative Reading of Sarah Grand and Alicia Little

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Ann Heilmann
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman

scholarly journals Beth Caldwell's Reading Experience

Spectrum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shelby Elizabeth Haber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Reading Habits ◽  
Reading Experience ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Personal Engagement

Near the end of the nineteenth century, Sarah Grand coined the phrase "New Woman," which was influential throughout the first wave of the feminist movement. This paper examines how Sarah Grand's representation of Beth Caldwell's reading habits in her novel The Beth Book acts as a metaphor for the subversive femininity of the New Woman. My project explores the ways in which Grand's feminist ideals are reflected in The Beth Book through the scenes when Beth is reading. I suggest that Beth's atypical engagement with books as textual and physical objects can be equated to social dissent. However, Grand also portrays Beth reading within educational and marital institutions. These experiences lead Beth's engagement with the text to become similar to common nineteenth-century reading practices. I conclude with the argument that Grand represents any personal engagement with a book, even if it is not especially radical, as capable of re-evaluating systemically-enforced interpretations.

The New Woman

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Z. Zrakowski
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
New Women ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
Female Consciousness ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Modernist Fiction ◽  
Ubiquitous Presence

A historical figure as well as a literary phenomenon, the New Woman was named in 1894 in an exchange between ‘Ouida’ (Marie Louise de la Ramée) and Sarah Grand in the pages of the New American Review. The New Woman was a ubiquitous presence in fin-de-siècle literature and journalism concerned with debates about the ‘woman question’, and influenced twentieth-century ideas about feminism and gender. The New Woman novel, with its mapping of female psychological space and emphasis on female consciousness, shaped modernist fiction. New Women were often political activists as well as writers, and agitated for reform on political and domestic questions. Most New Woman fiction rejects aestheticism in favor of realism; it deals with sexuality with a frankness that departed from Victorian codes of propriety and takes up issues such as suffrage, marriage, domestic violence, and the emancipation of women. In its realism, New Woman fiction departs from the aestheticism of the period, although some writers, like George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), used the techniques of aestheticism to examine women’s experience.

scholarly journals Sarah Grand and Oscar Wilde: Decadence, Desire, and the Double Life

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 731-751
Author(s):  
Catherine Maxwell
Keyword(s):  
New Woman ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Woman Writer ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Gender Ambiguity

It is usual to put the New Woman writer Sarah Grand alongside Oscar Wilde to mark their differences. However, this essay suggests that these two authors had more in common than at first appears, both with regards to the fashioning of their literary identities and to their literary productions. Grand's compendious best-selling novel The Heavenly Twins (1893) is usually seen as realist fiction, but its interlude titled “The Tenor and the Boy,” which was actually composed much earlier, presents a stand-alone narrative that owes more to the romance mode and is much more playful in tone and spirit. It also deals with the decadent theme of the secret double life, although crucially and dramatically Grand focuses on female subterfuge. After juxtaposing Wilde's “Lady Alroy” (1887), another text about the female double life, with Grand's interlude, I subsequently consider decadent qualities common to both “The Tenor and the Boy” and other Wildean texts including theatricality, doubling, gender ambiguity, and queer desire.

Reading Failure in(to) Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Sue Bridehead and Lady Jeune's “New Woman” Essays, 1885–1900

1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
William A. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Type I ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Short Story Collection ◽  
New Women ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Jude The Obscure

Thomas hardy was at work on his last novel, Jude the Obscure, when two of the best-known New Woman novels of the 1890s, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and George Gissing's The Odd Women, appeared in 1893. Hardy read The Heavenly Twins, or at least parts of it, in May 1893 and noted its criticism of the “constant cultivation of the [female] animal instincts” (i.e., the marital and maternal instincts) in his notebook (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:57). Hardy met Sarah Grand later in the spring and praised her to his friend Florence Henniker as a writer who had “decided to offend her friends (so she told me) — & now that they are all alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to” (Collected Letters 2:33). Hardy was also at this time looking into the popular short-story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), from which he copied a passage concerning man's inability to appreciate “the problems of [woman's] complex nature” (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:60). Hardy's interest in George Egerton continued for several years. He wrote to Florence Henniker in January 1894 and reported that he had “found out no more about Mrs. Clairmont [sic]”; Sue Bridehead at this same time was still “very nebulous” (Collected Letters 2:47). Two years later, Hardy had found the author of Keynotes and finished his novel: he wrote to Mrs. Clairmonte in late December 1895, two months after the publication of Jude the Obscure, and commented on their shared interest in the Sue characters “type”: “I have been intending for years to draw Sue, & it is extraordinary that a type of woman, comparatively common & getting commoner, should have escaped fiction so long” (Collected Letters 2:102). Hardy's comment suggests that Sue's origins were, at least in part, real New Women, and that he had been following the New Woman phenomenon for several years. Hardy had completed work on Jude in the spring of 1895 while simultaneously reading another New Woman novel, the best-selling and controversial The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen. Hardy wrote to Allen in February 1895 to thank Allen for sending a copy of the novel and to express his praise for the book, which he had read “from cover to cover.” Hardy added that it “was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view” (Collected Letters 2:68).

scholarly journals From a "Child of Light" to a "Woman of Genius": Sarah Grand's The Beth Book as the New Woman Bildungsroman

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilona Dobosiewicz
Keyword(s):  
Public Engagement ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Social Activist ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sarah Grand ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Development Result

The New Woman fiction, popular in the last decade of the 19th century, contested the traditional notions of gender roles and participated in the public debates on women’s rights. The protagonists of the New Woman novels refused to conform to the submissive and self-abnegating Victorian ideal of femininity. The article discusses the ways in which Sarah Grand, a prominent New Woman novelist and social activist, uses and transforms both the elements of her own life and the Bildungsroman conventions in her 1897 novel The Beth Book to create a heroine whose growth and development result in her personal independence and her active public engagement in women’s issues. Cast in a variety of social roles, Beth Maclure reclaims her agency and becomes an embodiment of the New Woman.

Gender, Technology and the New Woman

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lena Wånggren
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Woman ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Technology ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Grant Allen

This book examines late nineteenth-century feminism in relation to technologies of the time, marking the crucial role of technology in social and literary struggles for equality. The New Woman, the fin de siècle cultural archetype of early feminism, became the focal figure for key nineteenth-century debates concerning issues such as gender and sexuality, evolution and degeneration, science, empire and modernity. While the New Woman is located in the debates concerning the ‘crisis in gender’ or ‘sexual anarchy’ of the time, the period also saw an upsurge of new technologies of communication, transport and medicine. This book explores the interlinking of gender and technology in writings by overlooked authors such as Grant Allen, Tom Gallon, H. G. Wells, Margaret Todd and Mathias McDonnell Bodkin. As the book demonstrates, literature of the time is inevitably caught up in a technological modernity: technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle, and medical technologies, through literary texts come to work as freedom machines, as harbingers of female emancipation.

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